Iraq in Fragments: political message?

What do people think of the piece I have published below? I haven't been able to see the film yet. Does it conform with what is said below? Does it even make a political statement?


'The Three Fallacies of the Bush Plan for Iraq'


The only route to a more peaceful and stable Iraq is through political reconciliation between the opposing groups. The Iraqi government knows that, the Baker-Hamilton commission pronounced it in December, and President Bush said the same thing on Wednesday evening. He affirmed that the new plan, focused on securing control over Iraq's capital city, would have this goal because "reducing the violence in Baghdad will help make reconciliation possible".

And yet the President's plan is based upon three fallacies.

The first fallacy is that the US military can pacify Baghdad through more military offensives. The essence of the plan is for a gloves-off assault by US forces against Shi'a militias in Baghdad. This will fail for many reasons. Least of these is the fact that, in what amounts to a blip not a surge, the US is going to increase its troop numbers by only around 15%. Even then, the total of 152,000 troops will be below its peaks of 155,000 in February 2005 and 160,000 in November and December 2005. They were not able to bring peace to Baghdad then, and nothing has changed to make it easier this time around.

Increased use of force against Shi'a groups will simply recruit more to fight against the US. The Iraqi security forces are made up overwhelmingly of Shi'a, and if they are commanded to attack their own home areas, they are likely to desert en masse and join the militias to fight the US troops, just as many did when ordered to help crush the movement led by Moqtada al-Sadr in Spring 2004. The US military itself will find it impossible to separate the general population from the militias, and yet more will be alienated as US forces mete out their version of rough justice.

The second fallacy is that there is a distinction between the militias on the one hand and the government on the other. At the core of the Iraqi government are the Kurdish parties and their militias, the Shi'a fundamentalist parties SCIRI and Da'wa and their militias, and (the largest group in the United Iraqi Alliance which dominated the Iraqi government) backers of Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia. The Iraqi government will not move decisively against militias in general because it is largely rooted in them.

The third and most important fallacy is that, if suppression of the more defiant militias was achieved, it would lead to reconciliation. This goes to the heart of why US policy is failing to stabilise Iraq. Opponents of the Iraqi government know that Coalition forces will leave Iraq within a few years under the weight of US casualties and ebbing US domestic support, and so can afford to lie low during the periodic US assaults. They see no need to make a deal with the government, as they know they cannot extract many concessions now from it. Equally, the Iraqi government sees no need to negotiate seriously with the insurgents as long as it has the US military to fight battles on its behalf. And so the killing continues, with none of the key actors seeing it in their interests to make concessions or compromise.

The scaling-down of the US military presence would provide all the sides in Iraq with a window of opportunity to negotiate with each other. There would be serious risks, and the President needs a political plan to manage these risks. Instead, by using its military power to prop up the fragmented Iraqi state, the US is not only postponing the necessary political solution, it is making harder it to achieve.


Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala are co-authors of 'Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and its Legacy' (Hurst/Cornell University Press, November 2006).